


no greener grass and no deep blue sky

by PassionBlue



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Art, Artist!Keith, Emotional Hurt, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Painting, gallerist!Shiro, is it still a meetcute if i was heavily depressed?asking for a friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27598664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PassionBlue/pseuds/PassionBlue
Summary: The art gallery invitation sits on his desk unopened, because Keith likes to ignore everything that his agent sends him. Especially when the words ‘maybe you’ll get inspired’ are written in hasty letters on a tiny note attached to it.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Kudos: 39





	no greener grass and no deep blue sky

Sometimes Keith’s brain doesn’t work well; at least that’s what he calls it’s most prominent state of function.

This high-functioning body part, no, organ, of his needs a redo, but who has just brain parts lying around, ready to implant and help that imbalance of his? 

No one does. 

And really, Keith gets by.

On better days, Keith loves to dive into memories that let him not only hear and see but feel and taste everything around him. He can scent the summer warmth, taste the grass’ green, and is reminded of the simpler times, where it was only him and his sketchbook, and the park his dad brought him to.

But when it comes to his dad, Keith’s brain just won’t...work.

He’s rarely a shape in those memories. Keith’s heart hammers in his ribcage when he realizes that the memory of a random summer in ‘12 is fresher in his mind than his dad’s face.

Back then, Keith never sketched a human face. Animals, cars, yes. Sometimes landscapes with broad green strokes and blue splotches all over the sketchbook. Sometimes a little silhouette made it into those landscapes, with the proportions off. Then the little figure would look like it’s ant-sized in a world for normal-sized humans, living in it all of its own.

On the rainier days, Keith thinks back to that drawing, and to his dad. Thinks about the greenest grass and the bluest blue above him. And wonders why that memory still brings him as much pain as it brings joy.

The art gallery invitation sits on his desk unopened, because Keith likes to ignore everything that his agent sends him. Especially when the words ‘maybe you’ll get inspired’ are written in hasty letters on a tiny note attached to it.

At noon, he still stares at the envelope from his window ledge, contemplating if he should keep on ignoring the envelope or just throw it in the trash. Keith takes another cup of his coffee— his fourth today, thanks to a night without sleep the day before— and gets up.

The gallery isn’t far away, and really, it’s not an effort to get there. Keith loved to go to museums when he was younger, staring at gigantic artworks bigger than himself. His old man wasn’t an art lover per se, but he knew what brought Keith joy. When he could hold his temper, that is.

“Maybe you’ll get inspired, my ass,” Keith mumbles and takes the envelope in his hand, coffee mug still in the other. The blank canvas judging from the corner of his room, swiftly ignored, Keith opens it.

He looks at the invitation— classy, black and white— puts it on the smooth table in front of him, and pours coffee over it.

The cursive letters of the art gallery’s title don’t blur. It’s the good paper, then.

Keith sighs, pours the rest of the coffee into the sink, and searches for his pants. He doesn’t feel like showering and he won’t likely meet anyone he knows— not on a Monday noon that is— so he doesn’t.

From past events, Keith knows the building. He used to hang his own pictures there. They weren’t of landscapes or people, sometimes they weren’t about anything at all. Not the modern ‘red dot on white canvas’ either. Not even Keith knew at times what the drawings meant to him, just that he either liked them or not.

Today is no different from the times Keith was at the gallery before. But it’s the third day of the opening, and only a couple people are around, mustering a picture here and there with deep thought, while not paying a wisp of attention to others.

It’s a day where Keith’s most vital organ really fails him. He overanalyzes every person within range, and then some more. He feels the mustering gaze they give pictures of other artists as if they muster _him_. Criticize him. They aren’t criticism, they are elders, parents, children. Keith knows it’s not worth pondering, and does all it takes to break his gaze away from the people, and finally look at the drawings.

It takes a lot of effort. Keith musters the one in front of him, following colorful lines with his eyes. Where his mind would fill in the gaps, there’s a blank space, and underneath a bubbling panic. A feeling, that today of all days he shouldn’t have come here. 

He barely breached the entrance, but the sudden nausea makes him powerless. People are either too far or too close, and both are equally bad. A fleeting thought crosses his mind leaving a trail of guilt. He shouldn’t have drank the quarter bottle of herbal liquor at 3am, thinking it would help blur the edges. He should have eaten breakfast. Or lunch. Or anything.

Thankfully, there are benches at the gallery. With a goal in mind, Keith moves to them, flops on one of them and closes his eyes. 

Just a few more minutes, and he’ll go home. He’ll hide with the white canvas in his room, make some splotches, maybe search for a dry piece of bred to gnaw on, until sleep lulls him in tonight.

“It’s a lot,” someone says next to Keith’s ear, just when he thought that he hoped that no one would notice, approach or speak to him. Quite the opposite of a fateful encounter; it’s a fateful _fail_. Somewhat comedic, even. Keith snorts.

“Yeah,” he breathes, still with closed eyes.

The world that’s hidden behind his closed lids stays quiet, except for the background-noise-murmur of the other visitors. He somewhat expected that someone to carry on, but he stays tight-lipped for so long, that Keith simply opens his eyes to see if he’s still there.

“Oh,” the man says, eyebrows almost touching his hairline. “Feeling better?” The man hands him a bottle of water. Only then Keith notices how dry his throat feels.

“Thank you,” Keith murmurs, and takes a measured look at the person. Keith’s never seen him before. Not around the gallery or elsewhere. “Are you one of the exhibiting artists?” he asks, mouth feeling dry. Then takes a few gulps from his bottle.

The man shakes his head and points to a name card on his right chest. Keith’s gaze drops down, carefully reading the name. It takes more effort than anything today; and it might be because of that overworked brain of his. It most certainly does.

“You work here,” Keith states, hand fumbling at the bottle label. 

“Yeah,” Takashi Shirogane— or Shiro, how the man asks Keith to call him later— confirms.

“Since when?” Keith hears himself ask, staring at his thumbs. Then reads the name of the water brand.

“A couple of months.” 

“Ah.” 

Keith genuinely didn’t know it had been that long since he came here the last time.

Shiro nods at the painting Keith looked at earlier, then turns back to him. “What do you think about this one?” Shiro asks.

It’s supposed to be small talk, but for Keith it’s a test. If he’s smart enough to get it. If he truly _understands_ art. “It’s restless,” he says at the rushed strokes, “lonely,” at the big black area at the bottom left, “also, I think it’s priced over it’s worth.”

That last part comes from a deep, ugly space under a bridge that Keith wants to burn, so no one, no one can ever walk over it. He regrets that last part as soon as it’s out of his mouth.

Shiro only hums. “The artist told me that whenever he asks other people about their thoughts on a picture, their words don’t seem to describe the drawing.”

The bottle in Keith’s grip cracks.

“They describe a part about themself.”

Shiro doesn’t really get art, and directly tells Keith at their first meeting. It’s a miracle that Keith comes back to the gallery, knowing full well it’s for him, not for the drawings (he feels bad about that). 

The ignorant perspective is a good one, at least for Keith. It takes over two months of dating until he starts showing Shiro his art, of which Shiro deems every last one ‘beautiful’.

That blind reassurance, it’s something that Keith lacked. Ever since he started thinking of that drawing in the park, with the green grass and the blue sky. 

Ever since he started wondering if he could recreate that.

Shiro entering his life makes Keith reassured that there’s a second brain at work now— making up for all the skills he’s lacking— and the excitement of a fresh love blinds him into believing.

To Keith, forgetting about his ‘bad’ sides comes fairly easy. 

It takes four months of a steady-going relationship, and he forgets where he came from, what he was like, and how he will be.

Unlike Shiro, a part of him will always feel like the broken vessel, like the drawing from the park that he simply cannot recreate.

Shiro is supportive; more than that. He puts up with all of Keith’s moods, and doesn’t comment when he’s sour-turned-clingy, desperate, obsessed. But he’s powerless at the sight of his love pushing himself and breaking, to a point where a U-turn seems like an uncrossable bridge.

Dragging Shiro into Keith’s own personal mess was never the plan, and yet he was the conductor of a train rolling straight to the abyss. _Love can heal, but not fill the messed up gaps in you_ , Keith reminds himself.

A thing that once was pure joy to Keith became a burden so enormous, he’s completely disappearing under it. How will he ever be able to draw a grass as green as the one in the park, when life was easy and enjoyable? When his work did not engulf and gobble him up. 

Shiro’s mindless but heartfelt suggestion, that Keith could draw _him_ , surely didn’t help.

“I can be an obsession, you know. Maybe it helps?” Shiro only wants the best for him.

But Keith, he can’t. A part of him rejects everything about moving forward. If he’s honest, every part of him rejects moving at all. “It won’t fucking help,” he hisses.

“How do you know?” Shiro asks, voice so soft in comparison. He never cares when Keith lashes out uncontrollably— cornered. But then again, Shiro is the one who pushes him too far often enough.

“I just know, that’s why!” 

Keith tells him about the drawing. The beautiful blue, the beautiful green. That he tried to draw it again, for months, in his small atelier.

He went back to the park, just to check if the grass is the same. If they moved a bush. If they cut the trees. But all is the same, and nobody who visits the park knows that there’s just one piece of a puzzle missing.

Keith bought five different shades of green paint once, tried them all out and realized they barely differ. But they still aren’t the green he wants, and they aren’t the one-way solution he needs.

Every drawing eats more of his time and himself, and each time they get better and better— objectively. Keith hates them all. 

A week later, he starts fresh, on his seventh cup of coffee at 6am. Shiro gets up, while Keith hasn’t even slept.

“Enough,” Shiro tells him. “It’s enough.” First, the coffee mug goes, then the brush. Shiro collects the blues and greens he can grab, and pulls a disgruntled Keith from his chair, outside.

“Shiro,” Keith protests. “Where are we going?”

But Shiro doesn’t humor him, and doesn’t tell until they arrive. 

“What the fuck, Shiro?” Keith mutters. It’s the park. Shiro dragged him here. “Someone’s gonna call the police if they see me like this, in the park.”

Shiro puts his hands in his hips, looks around. Only one or two joggers make their rounds.

“Huh,” he breathes, then shrugs. “Let’s lie down.”

Inelegantly, Keith slumps down. The grass and ground is icky and wet, but Shiro doesn’t seem to mind as much. He takes one of the paint tubes, unscrews the top, and puts a splotch of green on his ring finger tip.

“I think,” he starts, first looking at the color, then next to him, at Keith, “you should try therapy.” Then, with a swift motion that Keith doesn’t fight, Shiro draws a grass green line on Keith’s nose.

“You didn’t need to take me all the way here to tell me,” Keith mumbles. The paint dries slowly on the tip of his nose. When he squints, he can see the color blur in the corner of his eye.

Shiro shrugs, eyes shifting from Keith to the sky. “Will you consider it?” he asks, then reaches for another tube of paint in his pocket. It’s another green, and he drops it to his side. When he finds a blue, he unscrews the top.

“It’s not the drawing,” Shiro says, because Keith still hasn’t replied. “It’s the feeling. You miss the feeling when you didn’t care.” Another line ends up on Keith’s cheek. Admittedly, he feels like crying at this point, but too embarrassed to do it.

“That easy,” he mutters instead. Frustrated, embarrassed. Shy.

“That easy,” Shiro insists. He puts another shade of blue on Keith’s face, and a small smile forms on his lips. “You wanna go, too?”

Keith doesn’t want to. But a part of him urges him to do this. Mostly the part that doesn’t want to disappoint Shiro’s face. 

Therefore he takes the first green— a mossy one— and pours a generous amount of it on his hand. He watches and anticipates how it feels on his fingers, watches strings of green form between them.

Then Shiro becomes his blank canvas— one that he actually starts filling.

They stay there, an hour or two, and Keith just works at the face in front of him. It won’t look good, and it won’t stay, but it’s fun. Sometimes, he touches somewhere ticklish, and Shiro laughs— or sneezes. Sometimes he thinks he’s onto something, and then he reminds himself that he’s at the park, in his pjs, drawing with only two colors on his boyfriend’s shape.

“This is stupid,” he mumbles, but very eager.

“You like it,” Shiro grins.

“Stay quiet, _canvas_.”

Shiro grins, but with tightly pressed lips.

It’s noon when Keith finally feels the satisfaction roll in. A one of a kind, which he hasn’t felt for so long. The feeling of actual joy while drawing, using his fingers, with precision as irrelevant as the finished product. Beautiful and horrific at the same time. And so intense, that Keith flops on his back into the green grass, looks at the blue sky and cries.

  
  
  
  



End file.
